| Zucas said:
Yes but we shouldn't under estimate it. Traditionally games needed like 10 hours. Games like Wii Sports, Nintendogs, and even Halo ask you to play in intervals of as little as 5 mins to an hour at a time. Not every game asks you to play continuously for an experience that is only complete after 30 hrs. Those are our hardcore games, btw. That's why the game industry is expanding because it's becoming more mainstream in the aspect that it's allowing people to get into it at their own pace. NOt simply saying here's an RPG or Zelda and have fun. People wonder why games like Wii Play, Nintendogs, and as I said even Halo sell so much. It's because it has that ability be a pick up and play title. And yes cost is a problem, which I mentioned, but its something that is solved with expansion. As the userbase grows prices go down to appeal to that userbase more. Production values can also get higher. Less risk due to userbase size always allows more risk with pricing and production. And as for the music industry it's still a lot larger than the game industry but I think Thriller came close to 80 million copies actually. Once again no source. |
You're right about pick up and play being an important reason of the growing industry and stuff, but also a lot of five minutes end up being ten hours finally, and if people are happy with their game, they won't need another one because one game (or a couple of games) can satisfy them for a long while. Of course one can say that films are usually watched more than once too and might end up adding to ten hours, but I still believe that the software tie ratio has no chance to ever match the movie tie ratio since you're just more involved with games than with movies.
You made a good point about prices though, that will be an interesting thing to follow.
And for the part about the music industry, that's possible. To have better numbers, I just read today in a newspaper that Coldplay sold a total of about 30 million albums, which averages to about 7.5 million copies sold per album since they released four up until now. Coldplay is quite big currently, so we can say that big gaming franchises are already selling a comparable amount to big music acts. Of course, the music industry is much much broader than the gaming industry is.
